Penelope Cruz channels Marilyn in Almodovar’s ‘Broken Embraces’, 2009

Spanish director Pedro Almodovar – who paid homage to Marilyn in his 2009 film, Broken Embraces - has praised her again in a recent interview for the Yorkshire Post, describing MM as one of the few method actors who could play comedy:

‘”To me, Saturday Night Live seems like cabaret, the cradle for decades of the best American comics. The Actor’s Studio, however, with all the respect and admiration it deserves, seems just the opposite to me,’ he explained. ‘Brando, a comedy actor? No. And he tried it. He even sang and danced in Guys and Dolls, stiff as a board, but Brando was too self-aware. I don’t know if Montgomery Clift ever actually tried it but I can’t imagine him. Or James Dean. Or Daniel Day-Lewis.”

‘I don’t debate his greatness but no matter how thin he is, Daniel Day-Lewis can’t manage to give the slightest sensation of lightness,’ Almodovar candidly stated. But surely, there must be someone who bucks the rule? Someone who managed to get the highest dramatic training, yet could still be effortlessly light and funny? Well, there is: ‘Marilyn Monroe is still the exception. Adopted by the Strasbergs, she managed to overcome the weight of the Method.’”

Monroe mania has hit New York City…Uma Thurman, star of Love, Marilyn and Smash, attended the opening of ‘Marilyn Forever’, the touring Milton Greene photo exhibit, now at Chopard‘s boutique on Madison Avenue.

Thurman, whose third child was born in July, shared her admiration for MM with Women’s Wear Daily:

“‘I always had the highest respect for her work,’ Thurman said of Monroe. ‘If you’re an actor or an actress…you can see how incredible her performances were, how complete and how full and how seamless and how alive. It’s not easy.’”

The Huffington Post asked John Strasberg, Sarah Churchwell and Joyce Carol Oates what direction Marilyn’s career might have taken if she had lived beyond 1962.

“Back in those days, women, after a certain age, just weren’t cast in movies. Bette Davis was the first one to fight through the prejudice about how women should look in movies and playing leading roles; she had won Academy Awards, but she couldn’t get a job, so she put out ads in Variety and the such. Whether Marilyn could have done that, I don’t know. Certainly there was the possibility of that.” - John Strasberg

“My belief about Marilyn Monroe is that if she had only resisted returning to Hollywood, to make such an egregious movie as Let’s Make Love, but had remained in NYC in association with the Actors Studio, she might well have had a stage career as a serious mature actress; she might even be alive today.” - Joyce Carol Oates

“She had seen women like Betty Grable bow out gracefully, say, ‘I’ve had my time, and now it’s time for something else.’ So I don’t think it was difficult for Marilyn to imagine that.” - Sarah Churchwell

With Don Murray. Photo by Milton Greene

The Los Angeles Times has interviewed several actors who worked with Marilyn, including co-stars Don Murray and Mitzi Gaynor, and Actors Studio colleagues like Louis Gossett Jr.

“She was trying to prove she was an actress of substance, and in my opinion she certainly did…She was a very experienced film actress, but she could forget so many of the mechanical techniques. She would constantly miss her marks so she would be out of focus or out of the light or in a shadow. I think it was a lack of confidence. For somebody who the camera loved, she was still terrified of going before the camera and broke out in a rash all over her body.” - Don Murray

“I never saw anybody work so hard. She did such a good job and personally, I think she stole the whole damn show. I just think she was thrown into a nest of vipers.” - Mitzi Gaynor

“So I am at the Actors Studio and there’s Brando and Marty Landau up front. She had Arthur Miller’s shirt on tied at the waist with some jeans and flip-flops. She says ‘Where’s Lou?’ Everybody starts giggling at me. I think it was a joke [by his classmates]. There is no way I could sit next to her. That’s the effect Marilyn Monroe had on me.” - Louis Gossett Jr

In an interview with the Miami New Times, photographer Larry Schiller talked about working with Marilyn:

“On the set of Let’s Make Love, you were photographing her in her dressing room and she asked you, ‘How often do you lie?’ Why do you think she was an insecure person?
Compare Marilyn Monroe to a great comedian or a great actress like Ana Magnani or Bette Davis. I think everybody is insecure in some way; otherwise they wouldn’t be a great talent because they are trying to express themselves and prove themselves to themselves and to the world, and I think Marilyn had a lot of demons in her life. A lot of demons. One of the demons that haunted her tremendously was the insanity in her own family — her mother being in a mental institution, her father attempting suicide, and she herself in pain. I think that inside there were demons we never knew about and dealt with. That’s number one.

Number two, I have a theory — which is based not on speculation or rumor, but based on what I’ve observed — and that is Marilyn was very secure in front of the still camera because she didn’t have to walk and talk all the time. In front of the moving camera, I think that she became very insecure because she had to have two or three things going on simultaneously. But she went to one of the greatest acting schools in the world, The Actors Studio, and she had one of the greatest acting coaches in the world, Lee Strasberg. She was a fine actress, but the world didn’t accept her as that. They accepted her as the dumb blonde. But I believe that that was a role she was playing all the time. Laurence Olivier played roles, Walter Matthau, all actors. But she played the same role all the time, and they wouldn’t let her out of that role by giving her other screenplays. That made her more insecure.”

Schiller claims to have visited Marilyn at home on the day she died to discuss selling photos of her nude swim to Playboy. He has also said that Bobby Kennedy was in the house when he called.

“You witnessed things many people didn’t, like Robert Kennedy at her home shortly before she died. Do you believe there was a conspiracy to kill Marilyn?
You know you can’t prove a negative — you can’t prove there are no flying saucers. Personally, I spent a lot of time with Bobby Kennedy after that. I was a photographer and I photographed his campaigns. I don’t think the Kennedys were the type of people that would deal with a problem that way. I also don’t believe there was a conspiracy to kill Robert Kennedy, just as I don’t believe there was a conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy.”

Carol Channing, who first played Lorelei Lee in the Broadway musical, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, paid tribute to Marilyn’s big-screen portrayal in a rededication ceremony for MM in Palm Springs yesterday, reports Broadway World.

“Miss Channing recalled seeing Miss Monroe for the first time from the stage, ‘second row center,’ sent by the studios to watch Carol in the role she created for the Great White Way as Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Channing recalled, ‘The audience and the cast found it hard to focus on anything but Marilyn, with the possible exception of our piano player … he only asked if she had a brother.’ When asked about the role that propelled her to international acclaim going to Miss Monroe on film, Carol said ‘She created her own brilliant and unique take on Lorelei, a completely different version of this girl who brought virginity to every man she met.’”

Actress Estelle Parsons – best-known for her Oscar-winning role in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and more recently, TV’s Roseanne - spoke to the Huffington Post about studying alongside Marilyn at the Actor’s Studio.

“You studied at the Actor’s Studio. Did you study with Marilyn?
She was always nervous when she worked. It was interesting because she didn’t seem to be that way in real life. I was thinking about that the other day, what was that all about? It seemed to be the thing that sort of attracted people to her, this kind of vulnerability that showed up when she was working. She was sort of an ordinary hard-boiled person like the rest of us. We were friends when she was married to Joe DiMaggio, my first husband was a part of that whole set. But this strange kind of nervousness came over her when she worked and it was very appealing to everybody. Well, to men anyway.

You know she’s on the cover of this month’s Vanity Fair?
No really? I don’t know what that says about the current crop of young women around.”

POSTSCRIPT: Estelle was also one of the TV reporters who interviewed Marilyn after the announcement of her engagement to Arthur Miller in 1956. View the footage here

Thanks to Fraser Penney

This second extract from Patrick McGilligan’s Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director concerns Ray’s attempt to include Marilyn in his 1956 movie, Bigger Than Life.

“‘Some weekends,’ [Gavin] Lambert wrote, ‘Nick arranged for a girlfriend to come over in the late afternoon, and asked me to stay out of the bungalow for “a couple of hours.” The girlfriend was usually one of several young unknown actresses, very occasionally she was Marilyn Monroe, and in any case [she] never stayed the night.

Divorced from baseball star Joe DiMaggio, Monroe was dating Ray again when convenient. She remained one of his deepest crushes, although he could never quite promote himself into the role of her steady ‘beau’ (as Hedda Hopper was encouraged to describe their relationship.) He couldn’t quite promote her into any film he was directing either.

Once, when Monroe visited the set of ‘Bigger Than Life’ at the end of the day – she was finishing ‘Bus Stop’ for 20th Century-Fox on a nearby soundstage – Ray tried coaxing the actress into a cameo appearance. Staging cutaways for a hospital scene, Ray talked Monroe into donning a nurse’s costume and carrying two lamps into camera range. ‘Carry them on the set,’ Ray advised her, ‘put them down, walk over to this desk, sit down and look at the star, who’s gone slightly off his nut.’

According to [James] Mason, who was in the scene, the cameo was intended as a laugh for studio executives at dailies, not for actual use in the film, but Monroe lost her nerve anyway. Ray couldn’t shoo away her anxiety. ‘Oh Nick,’ she said, ‘tell me what you want me to do! I can’t do it, Nick!’ Finally Ray called cut, according to Mason, giving Monroe a comforting embrace before announcing ‘that he did not think it was such a funny idea after all, so let’s not do it. “Come on, Marilyn, what do you what to drink?”‘ Ray later fed the item to Hedda Hopper, who ran it straight: ‘Marilyn Does Bit in Nick Ray’s Film,’ her column declared in May 1956, reporting that Marilyn had played her cameo role ‘like a lamb.’ Yet Monroe cannot be glimpsed in ‘Bigger Than Life’ – nor in any other Nick Ray film.”

 This new, academic study of method acting in the US by Rosemary Malague features Marilyn, arriving at the Actor’s Studio in 1956, on its cover. You can order it in paperback or as an Ebook from the Book Depository.

“‘I’ve been waiting for someone to write this book for years: a thorough-going analysis and reconsideration of American approaches to Stanislavsky from a feminist perspective …lively, intelligent, and engaging.’ — Phillip Zarrilli, University of Exeter ‘Theatre people of any gender will be transformed by Rose Malague’s eye-opening study An Actress Prepares…This book will be useful to all scholars and practitioners determined to make gender equity central to how they hone their craft and their thinking.’ — Jill Dolan, Princeton University ‘Every day, thousands of women enter acting classes where most of them will receive some variation on the Stanislavsky-based training that has now been taught in the U.S. for nearly ninety years. Yet relatively little feminist consideration has been given to the experience of the student actress: What happens to women in Method actor training?’ An Actress Prepares is the first book to interrogate Method acting from a specifically feminist perspective. Rose Malague addresses “the Method” not only with much-needed critical distance, but also the crucial insider’s view of a trained actor. Case studies examine the preeminent American teachers who popularized and transformed elements of Stanislavsky’s System within the U.S.–Strasberg, Adler, Meisner, and Hagen– by analyzing and comparing their related but distinctly different approaches. This book confronts the sexism that still exists in actor training and exposes the gender biases embedded within the Method itself. Its in-depth examination of these Stanislavskian techniques seeks to reclaim Method acting from its patriarchal practices and to empower women who act.”

 Film critic Mick LaSalle names Marilyn’s smouldering performance in Niagara among his ‘Evil Beauties of Cinema’, but with a caveat:

“Not Evil Even When She’s Being Evil: Marilyn Monroe in ‘Niagara.’ As Francois Truffaut said when he reviewed this film, Marilyn had no business playing evil characters. It’s just not who she was on screen.”

Well, I have to disagree with Truffaut on this. Monroe’s Rose is deliciously wicked, and the fact that we love her even when she’s bad is what makes Niagara so chilling!

 Douglas Eby focuses on Michelle Williams’ recent portrayal of Marilyn in an article for PsychCentral:

“Michelle Williams devoted some ten months to researching Marilyn Monroe for her acclaimed performance in ‘My Week With Marilyn.’

Producer Harvey Weinstein said he was impressed at the level of Williams’ preparation, how she could quote passages from Maurice Zolotow’s biography on Monroe.

‘Michelle researches a role like no one I’ve ever encountered,’ Weinstein wrote in an email. ‘She watched and studied the movies and photos; she read every book, every biography.… She could describe how Marilyn wiggled and winked while quoting some of her best lines, [like] when she teased that she was nude by saying, “I have nothing on but the radio.’” …

Williams probably also read: My Story, the autobiography by Marilyn Monroe.

She commented in an interview, ‘So I lived with her, and I never stopped trying to find more information. Even on set, on the 10-minute breaks, I would be back poring through photos or with my earphones in watching a movie. I was obsessed. I was on the trail of something. There were clues, and I had to solve a mystery.’

From my Inner Actor post Michelle Williams on Interpreting Marilyn Monroe.”

‘One of the many elements of My Week With Marilyn that I appreciated was the depiction of the emotional challenges Monroe suffered from the onslaught of fame and media attention.’ Eby explores this theme further in another article, ‘Actor’s Privacy and The Dark Side of Fame‘, with reference to ‘Through Your Own Grievous Fault’, an essay by Ayn Rand written shortly after Marilyn died.

As Catherine in Arthur Miller's 'View From the Bridge'

Actress Scarlett Johansson is often compared to Marilyn as a sex symbol and comedienne, and she has channelled the Monroe look in many photo shoots. However, as she told USA Today recently, she has no plans to play MM onscreen:

‘Two years ago, Johansson made her Tony-winning Broadway debut a neighborhood away in A View From the Bridge by Arthur Miller, the former husband, of course, of the icon she’s constantly held up against, Monroe.
And though her View part, Catherine Carbone, is legendarily loosely based on Miller’s ex-wife, don’t expect Johansson to become the next in the line of blondes (and one redhead) who have lately channeled the quintessential celluloid siren on screen and in magazine pages.

“There’s a lot there to explore, and I like to watch other people do it, but I have no interest” in joining the Monroe biopic brigade.

“It’s lovely to be compared to somebody as sort of effervescent and charming and fragile and I think kind of an underrated actor, really,” Johansson says. And “you know, beautiful and everything. But it’s never been one for me.”‘

Jerry Caesar reviews Marilyn’s show-stopping turn in All About Eve (1950):

“Bette Davis is the practised end of the spectrum and while Eve – as the alleged ingenue, all innocence and eagerness – should be her opposite pole, the most striking counterpoint comes from a short appearance by Marilyn Monroe. Then around 24, Monroe is a young actress on the make, and the moment she’s on the screen you stop looking at Davis. Now that’s power, and Davis must have known it.”

Vanity Fair‘s Bruce Handy re-evaluates Marilyn’s performance in The Prince and the Showgirl:

“The film is a classic example of Hollywood’s most prevalent genre: the awful movie made by talented people. The culprit isn’t Monroe’s neuroses, but rather a creaky, silly screenplay (adapted from what must have been a creaky, silly play). I wasn’t expecting it to be good, anyway, but I was hoping it would serve as a tutorial in opposing acting styles—Monroe’s intuitive emotional truths vs. Olivier’s precision-tooled affect. A clash of the titans, to reference another lousy Olivier movie.

Its best scene is a long would-be seduction, in which Olivier has invited Monroe to his apartment for a late-night repast. He then mostly ignores her, tending to business and assuming she’ll get drunk on his champagne and perforce go to bed with him. She, naturally, is onto him—she knows all the tricks—and here, Monroe is wonderful. Given a chance to show off her flair for comedy, she demonstrates that she too is capable of precise effects.

Olivier is a great on-screen, even in junk like this. For one thing, as the carriage scene shows, he understood stillness, and how to let the audience come to him, in a way that Monroe never did. She was more of a heat-seeking missile.

But it’s not a contest. When given the right scaffolding of dialogue and stage business, she too is great. Her greatest shortcoming as an actress, if it is a shortcoming, is that she didn’t know how to fake it. The second half of the film, where the story turns loopy and improbable—her character is forced into being a go-between for silly political intrigue—leaves her looking lost. Judy Holiday or Betty Hutton might have made it work, but that’s no knock on Monroe. The Prince and the Showgirl didn’t deserve to work. And when Monroe had real material—like with Some Like It Hot—she soared.”

In a CNN interview with Piers Morgan last week, Jane Fonda recalled meeting Marilyn:

“I was very, very drawn to her. To me, she was like a golden child. She radiated light and vulnerability. And I think that she was attracted to me as — she used to gravitate a little bit to me at parties, because she knew that I was not very secure, either. And she was fragile. I was very touched by her.

Michael Jackson, also, someone who was fragile. You know, both of them had these beyond famous iconic images. And yet in their innermost selves, they were very, very vulnerable, damaged people. And it was the tension between those two things, perhaps, that made them so brilliant in their — each in their own way.”

The daughter of actor Henry Fonda, Jane was eleven years younger than Marilyn. In her 2005 autobiography, My Life So Far, Jane explained how she decided to train at the Actor’s Studio after meeting Marilyn and the Strasbergs on the set of Some Like it Hot.